EMPTY JARS (FRASCOS VACÍOS)
2026 · 20m · Chile
Directed by Guillermo Ribbeck
Genres: dark comedy, fantasy, horror
In a decaying student residence, a woman frees a ghost from a jar and learns that freedom always comes with a price.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A ghost-in-a-jar premise is exactly the kind of high-concept absurdity that should be insufferable, but Ribbeck treats the surreal horror-comedy registers with enough tonal nerve that it actually lands—subversive without winking at itself.
The film's visual and tonal architecture sits thoughtfully between folk-horror traditions and contemporary magical-realist cinema, with careful attention to how metaphor (confinement, liberation, debt) structures both image and narrative arc.
The decision to play the ghost's emergence not as spectacle but as intimate, claustrophobic unease—keeping the horror tactile and grounded in the cramped student residence space—is the pivot that makes a conceptual premise feel genuinely unsettling.
Reviews
Guillermo Ribbeck's phenomenal EMPTY JARS is a stylishly directed dark fantasy set in a decaying student residence. A haunting masterclass in atmosphere and supernatural dread.